Every business deals with risk. But medium-sized businesses, with smaller IT staff and tighter operating budgets are often more exposed to risk than larger companies. This reality is never more evident than in a down economy: When the repercussions of a business disruption are as grave as they are, how do you insulate your business from risk?

"For mid-sized businesses, the financial impact of business disruptions is tremendous," said Anil Miglani, senior vice president, AMI-Partners. "We estimate that through security breaches and data loss alone, medium-sized businesses worldwide lost approximately US$4.7 billion in 2008."

According to strategy consulting firm AMI-Partners, in 2008 medium-sized businesses worldwide lost approximately US$4.7 billion due to security breaches and loss of data.

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●Quote for Today

Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren't so exciting.

Bill Gates
 

●Just for Laughs

Change, whether it is wanted or unwanted brings out our best and worst. The Stop Your Drama Methodology incorporates 8 principles and multiple tools for navigating change or reinventing any part of your life or business.

1. Clear the Fog
Where drama is, clarity is not. If you feel like you are shoveling coal in the boiler room instead of navigating the ship, then you have a clarity issue. When you are clear, your decisions are easy and emotions are steady. Clarity helps you handle the winds of change and life flows. First get clear about your values and vision. Everything flows from there.

2. Identify the Gap
The distance between where you are and where you want to be is the gap. The bigger the gap, the more potential for drama. If you can identify those times when you are moving faster than your resources allow, or when what you want seems too far out of reach, find a way to shorten the gap, by taking only the next right step. When you learn how to identify the gap, you can shorten it instead of suffering.

3. Tell Yourself the Truth
Drama is often the result of undisciplined thinking, manifesting as over-reaction to some imagined problem, regret about the past, worry about the future, or denial about the present challenges. To stop your drama, learn how to separate fact from feeling. Knowing your feelings won’t change the facts, but knowing the facts can change your feelings.

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We have heard a great deal about small businesses of late. It's been said they are the engine that will power our economy out of the recession. They will be the catalyst for employment growth, and future lending to small business will be the basis of any economic recovery. And while I agree that small businesses will be the impetus for change within our economy, it often seems that our leaders do not fully understand the pace at which small businesses move and how quickly they make decisions. Small businesses are not led by burdensome management or boards of directors who have fiduciary responsibilities to their companies' stock holders and as a result must weigh many factors in order to make a decision. Small businesses are agile, make both quick but thoughtful, rational business decisions, but also tend to react to the immediate needs and requests of their clients, customers, employees, and suppliers.

For small businesses to truly be the agent of a stronger economy, our leaders, our bankers, and our suppliers must recognize that small businesses make much faster decisions and can change direction quickly. Small businesses cannot afford to wait for months of legislative debate to take place before laws are created or fiscal policy is changed. They need ready access to capital, and once obtained will make business decisions that benefit their customers, their employees, and the economy.

The Speed of Small is FAST. Decisions and actions take place every day within small businesses that affect all their constituencies. It is only when those decisions and actions are delayed by outside forces that small businesses are hampered from moving forward. Delayed laws, withheld capital, slow access to products and services keep small businesses from starting the economic engine that they should be.

Having worked with small businesses for almost 25 years, it's exciting to see how they react, how they make decisions, and how they strive to move forward. Small business will lead our recovery and set the direction for our economy and country. Again, the Speed of Small is FAST.

Microsoft Word -
Navigate Tables with These Keyboard Shortcuts
 

The most common method for moving around a table is to click the specific cell you want to go to. However, if the table contains many rows and columns across a page, you could spend a great deal of time scrolling.

Word provides a number of keyboard shortcuts for quickly moving around large tables. Here are some examples:

Press [Alt][Home] to move the cursor to the first cell in the current row.
Press [Alt][End] to move the cursor to the last cell in the current row.
Press [Alt][PageUp] to move the cursor to the first cell in the current column.
Press [Alt][PageDown] to move the cursor to the last cell in the current column.
Press [Tab] to move the cursor to the next cell.
Press [Shift][Tab] to move the cursor to the preceding cell.
To set a tab within a cell, click inside the cell, and press [Ctrl][Tab].